EC: Bluesky Breaches Rules by Not Disclosing Number of Users

A European Commission spokesman reportedly said Monday (Nov. 25) that social media platform Bluesky is breaching European Union (EU) rules by not disclosing how many users it has in the EU and where it is legally established.

Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said all platforms in the EU are required to have a dedicated page on their website that includes that information, and Bluesky does not, the Financial Times (FT) reported Monday.

Regnier said the commission has not yet contacted Bluesky directly and that it wrote to the EU’s 27 national governments to see “if they can find any trace” of the company, according to the report.

Reached by PYMNTS, a Bluesky spokesperson said in an email that the company is “actively working with our lawyers now to ensure that Bluesky is compliant with the EU’s information disclosure rules.”

Founded in 2019, Bluesky is a U.S. public benefit company with a platform resembling that of X, with short messages and images posted by users, per the report.

Bluesky must have more than 45 million monthly users in the EU before the commission can directly regulate it, according to the report.

It was reported Sunday (Nov. 24) that usage of Bluesky’s social media app in the U.S. and Great Britain jumped by nearly 300% to 3.5 million daily users in the time since the U.S. election and the victory of Donald Trump, who is supported by X owner Elon Musk.

This growth has narrowed the gap between Bluesky and Meta-owned Threads, which was conceived as an alternative to Twitter before its name change to X. While Threads had five times the number of daily U.S. users as Bluesky before the election, it now has just 1.5 times as many.

Bluesky’s growth comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose to scale back the prominence of political content across Meta’s apps, which also include Facebook and Instagram.

Bluesky also experienced a surge of popularity in February when it dropped its invite-only requirement. The social media app attracted nearly 800,000 new users on its first day open to the public.

The decentralized and open-source platform’s journey began with an invite-only beta in 2023 that generated significant interest and even led to invites being sold on eBay for $400.